Cool water dispensers are familiar items in offices and factories and provide a convenient and readily available source of drinking water. Water dispensers generally utilize returnable or single use water containers made of synthetic polymeric material, such as polycarbonate, PET, etc.
PET containers have the advantage of being relatively light compared with other materials and are producible in large quantities by a process of blow molding. Respecting the environment requires reducing the weight especially of the single use containers. Furthermore, PET is also a relatively expensive material, thus the development of containers which are as light as possible is very important. With the lightening of these containers there is always the issue of the vacuum created during the drawing of the water. Typically, these containers must resist to a maximum vacuum pressure in the range of 50 mbar to 75 mbar. The resistance to this vacuum pressure is given by various factors, such as material distribution, weight, shape, ribs and design of the container. Therefore, the lightening of these containers is pushing companies to broaden their view to find new solutions. The need to limit the amount of PET leads to the development of containers with structures which are able to adequately compensate for the fragility due to the thinness of the walls. It is evident that it is not easy to have containers of this type with very thin walls. Instead of working on thinning the walls, or in addition to that, another idea is to consider the neck of the large-sized containers. Usually, these containers have the typical 55 millimeter neck finish which has a weight of approximately 34-38 grams. Furthermore, the length of the neck must be kept at a given value in order to be able to position it on a conventional type dispenser with which the water can be drawn. These large water containers, when inserted in the dispenser, are turned upside-down and positioned with the neck downwards in a funnel at the top of the dispenser. Thus, the need is felt to find a way to reduce the amount of material used for the neck, yet maintaining its functionality at the same time.
Document US2011/0225934 describes a plastic bottle the neck of which is not provided with the typical support ring, also known as “neck ring”, which is used for handling the bottle and/or the preform from which the bottle is obtained. Instead, the bottle and the preform described in this document use the fixing ring for handling the preform and/or the bottle. However, such a configuration requires specific handling means, disadvantageously forcing to adapt the existing handling systems.
Document US2006/0204694 describes a bottle and a preform with a specific neck configuration in which the support ring is relatively distant from the opening of the neck. Furthermore, this type of neck does not include additional rings and, as a whole, is not a neck designed to be particularly light.
Such known configurations are not suited to provide a neck of a container, in particular of a large size bottle for water dispensers, with a lighter neck.